Sr. Engineer, Database Reliability

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Sr. Engineer, Database Reliability based in the United States.** We are seeking a senior database reliability engineer to shape and strengthen the infrastructure powering critical, stateful services. You will oversee relational databases and caching systems, driving reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence. Working across MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and cloud infrastructure, you will establish best practices that help engineering teams build secure, resilient services. This remote role combines hands-on technical problem-solving with architectural leadership, automation, and mentorship. You will influence the evolution of the data platform while making reliable database operations easier for teams across the organization. ### Accountabilities - Own the reliability of caching infrastructure, including capacity planning, failover strategies, upgrades, and healthy usage patterns across Redis Enterprise and AWS ElastiCache. - Participate in the production on-call rotation and act as an escalation point for database and caching incidents. - Support internal engineering teams with query troubleshooting, storage guidance, schema design, and database performance optimization. - Manage database and cache infrastructure through Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools, improving provisioning workflows and ensuring safe, repeatable changes. - Develop reusable database and cache templates, standards, and platform workflows that enable teams to launch scalable, secure, and performant services. - Build and maintain observability solutions, including dashboards, alerts, metrics, logging, and service-level objectives, to identify issues before they affect customers. - Improve performance, resilience, and scalability across MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis environments as workloads evolve. - Advise product and engineering teams on database architecture, technology selection, query patterns, caching strategies, and capacity planning. - Lead technical design reviews, mentor engineers, and establish operational standards through documentation, reusable patterns, and runbooks. - Write automation and tooling to eliminate repetitive work, solve infrastructure challenges, and improve the effectiveness of the database reliability practice. - Apply AI tools thoughtfully to code development, query-plan analysis, log investigation, documentation, and incident response, validating outputs carefully when working with production systems. ### Requirements: - At least 7 years of experience in systems administration, systems engineering, or software development, including at least 4 years operating production relational databases. - Deep expertise in either MySQL or PostgreSQL, with practical working knowledge of the other database engine and its ecosystem of extensions and tools. - Experience designing, operating, and scaling caching systems such as Redis, with a strong understanding of the trade-offs between caching and underlying databases. - Proven experience building and maintaining highly available, cloud-based database systems on AWS or another cloud platform. - Proficiency with Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code tools and experience managing infrastructure through automated, reviewable workflows. - Familiarity with Kubernetes or other distributed systems and an understanding of the challenges of operating stateful workloads in orchestrated environments. - Hands-on experience implementing observability for data systems using tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch, including meaningful monitoring of query performance, replication lag, cache hit rates, and service health. - Strong coding and automation skills, with the ability to troubleshoot application code, build internal tools, and develop backend services when needed. - Experience with incident response, production support, reliability engineering, performance optimization, and disaster recovery. - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to understand product teams’ workloads, explain technical trade-offs, and help colleagues make informed decisions. - Demonstrated technical leadership through design reviews, mentorship, knowledge sharing, and the development of clear, practical documentation. - Sound judgment when using AI-assisted tools, including the ability to verify generated code and analysis before applying them to production data systems. - A proactive, customer-focused mindset and a commitment to continuous improvement, shared ownership, and helping teams become more self-sufficient. ### Benefits: - United States salary range: $174,200–$261,200 per year. - Additional compensation: Equity opportunities and performance-based bonus potential. - Remote work: Fully remote position, with eligibility dependent on approved work locations and applicable employment requirements. - Competitive and equitable compensation practices: Pay is determined based on demonstrated experience, role-related knowledge, skills, abilities, business impact, and internal equity. - Full-time employment within an engineering organization focused on infrastructure reliability, automation, and technical excellence. - The role offers opportunities to shape database reliability practices, influence platform architecture, and mentor engineers across teams. - Specific healthcare coverage, retirement benefits, paid time off, and other individual benefits were not detailed in the provided job description.